I expected the reaction of the progressive blogosphere to this speech to be harsh, but it hasn’t been for the most part and I am not sure why. As best as I can guess, it’s because this speech reminded people why they liked Obama and worked to get him elected. After all, CBS says 83 percent and CNN says that 78 percent of the people had a positive reaction of the speech. And there were elements of the speech that should please progressives. He said that all of our troops will be leaving Iraq (which is probably not true), he called for the repeal of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) law, he committed to letting the Bush tax cuts for the rich sunset, and he vowed to keep up the fight to pass health care reform.
But he also announced several things that most progressives don’t support, including a spending freeze on discretionary spending, and new nuclear power plants and more off-shore drilling. He also used some right-wing framing on several issues and even aped John McCain and his obsession with earmarks. Most of all, he doubled-down on the post-partisanship rhetoric and approach.
These things usually evoke a kind of Pavlovian gag reflex from a good subset of progressives. For some reason, the criticism has been muted. I think that’s good.
I think people enjoyed seeing Obama scold both the Supreme Court and the Senate Republicans. For my part, I wasn’t overly impressed with his response on health care. I like that he committed to keep up the fight, and he did a good job of making the case for reform. I just don’t think he was forceful enough. I can tell that the Democrats in Congress are begging for leadership and direction, and he didn’t articulate the path forward. For me, that’s what has been lacking, and he didn’t solve the problem tonight when he had the spotlight.
In the end, the proof will be in whether they get something passed or not. If they do, and it is a little better than the Senate bill, then I’ll give him credit. But if the reform effort fails to produce anything, I will have no choice but to criticize the president for too much passivity on his number one priority item.
So, good speech, nice performance, but I need to see some more fight.
I want to digest the other more thematic and aspirational elements of the speech before I comment on them. Hopefully, I’ll have something interesting to say about that tomorrow.
I feel he’s essentially dumped health care on the Senate and House. Where Hillary had been too hands on, he truly has been too hands off.
I think he doesn’t want to be too closely associated with it, so if/when it fails, he can imply, well, it wasn’t MY bill.
That bill will saves lives. For all its faults, it will. And I wish he’d just said that.
But it was fun watching him. I got a sports bar to turn it on, and everyone for the most part stopped and watched the whole thing. One of the bartenders was high-fiving me at the end. A second was more skeptical, waiting to see actions. “He gives a good speech,” he said, but what happens next?
It was hard to hear everything because invariable people turned and commented to each other. I’ll watch a replay at some point so I can see it uninterrupted.
And for all my frustrations, I just honestly like the guy. He’s a Leo, I’m a Sagittarius. We’re both fire signs. I just get him. I feel like I know him in a way I can’t explain. I feel like I know his heart. But that’s not to say that’s what he acts from. And that’s what’s so frustrating. There’s a disconnect there, and I’d really like to know where that comes from.
I keep pointing this out and waiting for a concrete response.
Clinton tried to punish Senator Shelby for being a backstabbing sleazeball – and Shelby became and has prospered as a Republican.
Moynihan backstabbed both Carter and Clinton and got away with it.
What lever does Obama have that Clinton and Carter did not?
“That bill will saves lives. For all its faults, it will. And I wish he’d just said that.”
NO! Your statement above is why this legislation will fail. Progressives don’t know how to sell progressive legislation! Could you ever imagine a conservative selling a piece of signature legislation with “for all its faults…”? Never! They’ll tell you tax cuts will cure cancer; raise your kids; and improve your golf game before they would ever diminish it with “for all its faults…”. Progressives, liberals, whatever the name have spent a better part of a year telling the American public this legislation is a piece of shit. Congratulations! They believe you.
That’s also a part of the problem. Some progressives don’t want to share the blame. It is easier to shift the blame on someone else.
I have never seen a SOTU address give actual specifics on how some bill will be passed procedurely. As I figured, people will find something to complain about. It’s a neverending affliction.
There were some folks upthread who made the comment that he doesn’t know how to lead Congress and of course the blogs have pointed all of that out.
That is just so funny. People within the blogosphere really live in a bubble. Because as I have always said, the netroots makes up such a small sliver of the base. The public’s perceptions of the President for better or worse are very different than what we read on the intertubes.
I think it explains a little of his head/heart disconnect and the reason why he defaults to technocratic liberalism as a standard response.
It also explains pretty compellingly, I think, his skepticism of “countercultural” liberalism and progressivism. I don’t think he’s entirely right to dismiss that strain of the American Liberal-Left but he experienced it first hand as a child and his skepticism is embedded pretty deeply.
Interesting. I didn’t get that from that book. Or, I should say, listening to that book. I probably missed a lot though – I was always listening while doing something else – driving, walking, etc.
I think a lot has to do with the Father/Son dynamic and the image of his father as a highly educated “savior” of others that he was constantly confronted with as a child and teenager.
My sense is that Obama respects what the countercultural and identity liberals were attempting to accomplish, but is deeply ambivalent both about the means and actual ends.
Do you think that he might see his mother as a bit of a left-wing flake? I don’t know, but I have friends who had mothers who were flighty, promiscuous, self-centered, neglectful, and solidly left-wing and countercultural. And it left them feeling pretty ambivalent about the means and ends of the far left.
I think he might. He calls out the sixties Left pretty strongly in The Audacity of Hope and always does these left/right contrasts in his writings and these weird equivalencies. He does it in the intro to Dreams too.
I’ve always wondered about what was really driving Obama’s post-partisan/bi-partisan resolve. Some of it is I think his constitutional scholars perspective but I always suspected there was something else driving it — especially since his administration is continuing the expansion of “The Imperial Presidency” we’ve been seeing over the last 40-50 years. And that seems at odds with his post-partisan, let’s get congress reengaged approach to HCR and clean energy.
So I went and read Dreams over Xmas to see if I could get a better sense of what’s been happening. I had read Audacity first a while back and I think Dreams gives a much better sense of the man.
Dreams shows that there was this push from his mother to be reflective, scholarly and intellectual and at the same time wide-open to diverse experiences and his father — at least while in the US — had a very narrow scholars approach to life and subordinated everything else to the life of the mind.
Obama lived in a very different space than his peers and not just because he identified as an African-American and was middle class in an elite school.
I have a similar reaction to tonight that I did at the DNC in 08. He pounded the GOP then and pounded them now. The tone was exactly what I’d hoped for.
What happens next is crucial. He has to keep the stick he wielded tonight out and ready to use. When Geithner balks at attacking the banks, Obama’s going to have to slam him with it. When the fuckup caucus of ConservaDems whines, he’s going to have to sock each of them on the forehead. And so on and so forth.
To me, Afghanistan is already a failure, so he did me no favors talking it up. The pandering about drilling and nuclear power (especially after he’s cancelled Yucca Mountain) is kind of bleh.
I wonder if Bernie Sanders and any of the HR 676 people will take Obama up on his invitation to come up with a better plan for health care. I wonder if Obama will actually listen.
I don’t think procedural details belong in SOTU – and anyway, if he gave them, they’d become an instant target and distraction.
On the other hand, I’d’ve liked to hear a strong defense of the Senate bill, with a clear explanation of its major components and of what benefits it will bring. No one else is going to undertake this educational campaign, and the WH is months behind on explaining how reform will work.
Just wanted to add that overall I thought Obama did a fantastic job. I was hoping for a New Hampshire-like comeback, and I thought we got a good bit of that.
I especially liked the way he refocussed from health care to jobs and the economy. Beforehand I thought I’d see making anything but health care the main focus of the speech as an admission of defeat; afterward I thought he effectively managed to move the conversation out of the health care mire without abandoning the field. Great job.
That’s exactly what I was going to say, Rachel. A president doesn’t stand up before the nation and tell the congress how to get bills passed. That’s their job. Separation of powers and all that. He just tells them he wants it passed.
While I’m thrilled to have a President who believes in letting Congress do their jobs, there’s a point at which your star player has to get it done. Whatever sport you want to pick:
At the 1 yd line, the best QBs will stand up and take the ball themselves over the line. With 3 on the clock, you want the ball in Jordan’s hands. In sudden death overtime, you want your captian taking the face off.
It doesn’t matter how you look at it. Pres. Obama has been ‘hands off’ so far, and it’s admirable that Congress has gotten it to this point. But now is his time. He’s going to own this no matter what. He has to go in, pick a process and say “this is the best way we have, go do it and I’ll have your back.”
In time, Congress will ween itself off of depending on Presidental direction – and they’ve made real progress on that in this debate. However, it’s all on the line right now, it can be done, NOW, if he gets involved. People are dying, and he can save them.
All that said…I’m in semi-agreement, going back on an earlier expectation of what I wanted to see in the speech, that maybe listing a proceedural way forward during the SOTU might have been a tad odd.
You will not see the quarterback make the goal on the 1-yard line until the ref raises his hands.
Publicly hands off does not necessarily mean hands off.
I suspect that when the history of this legislation is written, we will discover that more has been done behind the scenes that we imagine.
Don’t know if it’s true, but some righty blogs maintain that Rahm Emmanuel threatened Ben Nelson with cuts in funding to Offutt AFB during healthcare negotiations in December.
Right, TD, that’s my point. Not that Obama should be, or actually has been, “hands off” on legislation, but just that you don’t do it in public, especially in a SOU.
I think that he did a great job! The criticism that he is not specific enough on what he wants from the House or Senate on HCR, in my view, is not justified. The Congresspeople and especially the Senators are trying to put all the responsibility on the President instead of being the legislators that they are supposed to be. They are looking for an excuse, in case HCR isn’t as popular as they would hope, to blame someone else.
They are gutless and can’t seem to stand on their own! They should just do their job and quit whining! They know what the right thing to do is, now they should just do it!
Yeah, I’m kind of getting bored with being hysterical all the time. It fucks with my muse.
I didn’t find the speech as remarkable as some others did, but I didn’t hate the thing. I guess I’m still a sucker.
Well, we could have had this guy.
Oh come now, that was cute in its own way. 🙂
Like I said, I usually think he steps up to the plate on speeches, and this was no exception. My only problems with it were two things:
Chris Bowers introduced that ‘villains’ narrative.
It’s about the last thing that would have occurred to me. I’m not looking for villains.
Yeah, I liked that part of his narrative when I read it. I didn’t agree with his overall analysis, per se, but I liked that aspect.
Well, Obama did identify villains, he just didn’t try to make his presidency all about vanquishing some villain. Bush tried that and failed. I don’t need a repeat.
Failed? Depends on what his goals were. I think he was a spectacular success at undermining the Constitution, accumulating power in the Executive, changing the SCOTUS, rewarding Wall St. and his pals in the armaments and oil industries, and so on.
I thought he bad-mouthed the bankers about as much as he could… what more did you want? Here’s Josh Marshall’s comment after that part of the speech:
ZOMG! Advocating violence! ZOMG!
/sarcasm
“He said that all of our troops will be leaving Iraq (which is probably not true)…“
So, he lied. Wow, no wonder such a huge majority approved the speech!
Tell me lies, tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies…
It’s not how he says it.
It’s not even what he does.
It’s what the media say about it.
And they are saying he was not so good.
So…he was not so good.
End of story.
But not the end of the storyline.
He sold airtime when he was the wunderkind.
However…what happens when the wunderkind succeeds?
End of story.
End of sold airtime.
So his failure is the story now.
The Perils Of Pauline, Pt. II.
And the rubes jes’ keep on ‘a watchin’.
Soon…when that becomes old news…he’ll have a comeback.
Bet on it.
Just in time to lead into the 2012 (s)election. And you know how fascinatin’ them (s)elections kin be.
If he doesn’t rock the boat too hard and there are no major disasters to the bodies politic and economic…why, he’ll get another term.
if not…there’s always Hillary and the renascent…revivified, if you consider a story’s need for villains…Ratpublicans. Plus as the WWF’s Vince MccMahon could tell you, villains can always be morphed into heroes if ratings go down. Just keep the story moving.
And on and on and on and on and on and on…
Wake the fuck up.
State of the Union my royal Irish ass.
State of Obama’s role in the dumbshow.
Bet on it, Pt. II.
Later…
AG
Is O’Bama Post-Partisan Depression a “pre-existing condition”?
He didn’t say “all troops would be leaving Iraq”. what he said was “all combat troops would be leaving Iraq”. He has always said that some troops would remain after the combat troops were withdrawn such as troops needed for protection of the embassy.
True.
And if anyone wants to explain again why we are in Afghanistan I’ll listen. Call me a crazy progressive or whatever Boo calls us today, but it seems apparent that this is just another U.S. military occupation of a foreign land for the benefit of corporations (which don’t even have any loyalty to America).
Obama has a leadership deficit?
I knew you’d see it eventually.
I can tell that the Democrats in Congress are begging for leadership and direction, and he didn’t articulate the path forward.
Forgive me but anyone can tell that, because they are bleating about to their sources. Anyone who doesn’t know this isn’t reading the blogs.
My reaction was that it was a tougher speech on Republicans than it appeared and that the American people might just see that Democrats know where the issues in moving things through Congress are.
The nuclear power, clean coal, offshore drilling section was a setup of the Republicans. Nuclear power [Republicans cheer], clean coal [Republicans cheer], offshore drilling [Republicans really go nuts cheering]. And then, “That bill has passed the House; we need to get it through the Senate.” [Republicans sit on their hands]
There were a number of sections like that during the speech. Once you figured out the pattern and that the stuff progressives oppose was already sitting in the Senate, that took a lot of the reflexive response out of it.
A lot of the signaling on health care came outside of the specific reference to it. Like in chiding Democrats that “We have the majority; don’t head for the hills” (I think that was the way he put it). It was also interesting that he is taking ownership of whatever bill comes out of Congress and saying what it does but not how it does it–letting Congress work that out. He no longer has to convince the American people of anything but what the bill does. And all the prodding of Congress dealt with overall process in Congress and not health care specifically.
The small business capital gains tax holiday is somewhat troubling. It applies to all investments in small businesses, even investments by large businesses in small businesses. It could be the basis of the next bubble if the legislation is not written carefully. And it should phase out as the discretionary spending freeze phases in if it is to be a counter-cyclical measure and not just a pander to small business.
I had very much the same reaction. I was puzzling over the setup all the way until the energy section. When I heard the words “Nuclear power” and “Clean Coal” my heart sank; then you got to the payoff, which I remember as something like let’s even the playing field for green energy and I began to see what he was up to.
I think it was a remarkably effective political speech and he did some clever things. There was triangulation of the Republican message, a la Clinton, but for the most part absent the capitulation. The freeze that caused so much rancor in the progressive blogosphere of late was, to me, not much more than doing what he’s always said he’d do: go through the budget line by line and get rid of waste, and his implication was that that would leave MORE money for education and other true areas of need. So for example with energy his message was really rah-rah we’re going to be #1 by going green. He framed Democrats as tax-cutting champs, just not for the wealthy few. But he also smacked around the Dem Senate pretty good and made them squirm
I think in an odd way he co-opted an Alan Grayson message, but in an Obama way (that happens to clock in at 80% in the instant polls). There was a mischievous nastiness to the speech cloaked in his genial, likeable personality. He’s got some locker-room trash talk in him that he puts to good use. He set up the Republicans, as Rachel Maddow pointed out, to basically sit on their hands while he bashed the banks, advocated tax cuts, talked about fighting terrorism, etc.
My favorite moment of all was to see him stand there and spit on the Roberts court’s activism. They were 20 feet away from him and he Alan Graysoned them to their stony, corrupt faces in front of the world. And the average voter at home watching was set up to say, “WTF, why should corporations and foreign money be allowed dominate our elections???”
I’ll REALLY like the speech if he uses its political afterglow to quickly and quietly take care of DADT in a matter of weeks, and if he and Reid and Pelosi somehow already have a deal in place to fast track the flawed HCR package with planned improvements. The ultimate success of the speech depends entirely on seizing the moment.
Re: the Supreme Court. Apparently Samuel Alito silently exploded and lip readers said that he said “that’s not true” — sort of a Supreme Court Joe Wilson response. Which shows that Alito might not have thought clearly about the implications of doing the bidding of the corporations. There are corporations registered in the US that are indeed arms of foreign governments.
Thought clearly? Surely you jest — unless you mean clearly knowing who he sold himself to.
Rest assured it’s not half the speech Pres. Kucinich would have given….
.. the executive order pen get whipped out, although it was to water-down the commission that might have actually gotta a reign in on spending.
I think the campaign mush have innoculated me to Obama’s speeches. What actually excited me a year ago now leaves me wondering “what’s the big deal?”
My major reaction isn’t what he DID say–it’s what he DIDN’T say. THERE’S NO WAY OUT OF THIS MESS THAT ISN’T GOING TO INVOLVE A LARGE DEGREE OF PAIN FOR EVERYONE! Political reality may not permit him to say that, but when political reality and objective reality conflict eventually political reality will lose.
All political speeches leave me cold, and always have, including Obama’s. He’s a skillful speaker. So what? I don’t care what he says, I don’t care what he doesn’t say. What I care about and what I pay attention to is what he does, and when he says one thing and does another – well, that only proves that he is a politician.
The Alito moment when he was mouthing ‘not true’ while Obama brought up the Supreme Court ruling…will media beyond Keith and Rachel & probably Jon Stewart pick up on it…will CNN add it to their new fact checking segment?
CNN did polling on the responses from Twitterers and viewer response and to see John King try and pick apart the positive results for Obama was fairly entertaining. It was a good media moment of what happens when reality slaps around a pundit.
Leave it to Ta-Nehisi to give the best response to Tweety’s “I forgot Obama was Black…” comment.
Ta-Nehisi Coates get it!!!!
“I Just Remembered Chris Matthews Was White”
http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2010/01/i_remembered_chris_matthews_was_white_tonigh
t.php
“…I think it’s worth noting that Chris Matthews wasn’t trying to take a shot at anybody. I also think it’s worth noting that he was attempting to compliment Obama and say something positive about what he’s done for race relations. (See Matthews’ clarification here.) But I think it’s most worth noting that “I forgot Obama was black”-in all its iterations-is something that white people should stop saying, if only because it’s really dishonest.
…Ditto for Chris Matthews. The “I forgot Obama was black” sentiment allows the speaker the comfort of accepting, even lauding, a black person without interrogating their invented truth. It allows the speaker a luxurious ignorance-you get to name people (this is what black is) even when you don’t know people. In fact, Chris Matthews didn’t forget Barack Obama was black. Chris Matthews forgot that Chris Matthews was white…
… I would submit that a significant number of white people in this country, can not stop fighting on the lie. They can’t cop to the fact that they really have no standing to speak on Obama’s relationship to blackness, because they know so little about black people. It’s always hard to say, “I don’t know.” But no one else can say it for you.
…This is why Obama will never be postracial-he can’t make white people face the lie of their ignorance, anymore than Jimmy Baldwin could make black people face the lie of our homophobia. It’s white people’s responsibility to make themselves postracial, not the president’s. Whatever my disagreements with him, the fact is that he is brilliant. That he is black and brilliant is pleasant but unsurprising to me. I’ve known very brilliant, very black people all my life. At some point that number of white people who still can’t their head around our humanity will have to accept the truth: the president is black, and even if you don’t quite know what that means…”
YES….YES….YES!!!!
This sista bows to TNC!
strange that Tweety got all warm and fuzzy-feeling last night as he thought about the significance of a black man delivering the SOTU. It’s been a year. It’s really been more than a year, if you count election night 2008 as the moment of realization. There have been moments since when I’ve stopped and thought about how the mere fact of Obama being president is pretty astonishing from the point of view of progress on race-relations. But it’s not like I didn’t get most of that feeling out of my system within a few days of the inauguration. It’s a good thing that enough white people are willing to vote for someone black to make it possible for a black man to be president. That certainly did not used to be true in this country, and it probably isn’t true in Europe today. So, yeah, we can hail progress. But it’s the complete wrong way of looking at this to say Obama makes us forget he is black. That takes half the progress away. Coates is right, Matthews forgot that he thinks being black is disqualifying (because Obama proves that it isn’t).
You know, I forgot I had a penis for an hour last night. Didn’t mean anything. I was just too focused on the speech to think about it. I didn’t think once about the president being black during his speech either, and it meant about the same thing.
But Matthews wants credit for his newfound generous racial feelings. So, he has to talk about it.